Speech to Anyone Who Will Listen by Andrew Kennard

My most honorable peers and teachers, I must say that your company is indeed a true delight to my heart. With much joy do I enter upon our discussions and find a great store of gems of opinion and learning, waiting to be mined. It is my hope that the following comments shall not diminish your perception of me or of this joy I have in our relationship. For weighing upon me is a grievance in our language that plagues me like the foulest disease, and if I do nothing to voice my concern the worrying of it will consume my body until my skin is green and oozes pus. What could possibly be so rank a canker as to cause me such distress? It is the befouling of our language with cheap trinkets of words, a devaluing of our diction that threatens to linguistically bankrupt us. The worst offender in this mob of pipsqueaks is that devious dastard, the word ‘hella.’ Even now my computer quivers in agony and alerts me of this wrongdoer in a midst of innocent words with a red scribble. Rendering otherwise effective sentences impotent from its virulent strain, ‘Hella’ is insidiously penetrating our verbal population like the flu. It strains against the limits of the adverb, modifying much more than it should; it won’t be long before it has jumped the evolutionary bridges into the realms of adjective and verb. We must stop the plague before it poisons our language and cripples it for eternity.

It is impossible to stop the progression of language, some have argued; ‘hella’ and its friends are merely a natural part of our language’s aging and their presence should not be resisted. But do citizens of a city not protest when the government takes away their park to turn into a fetid garbage dump? Does a mother do nothing while her once innocent son turns to drugs and illegal activities? Does a man sit idly by while robbers steal all of his possessions, getting up only to offer them his chair on their way out? Friends, we may not be able to stop the relentless change in our language, but we do not have to accept it without a fight! We must rise up before we lose a most treasured trove of modifiers being wiped into obliteration by the uncaring ‘hella.’ By using these words we can inoculate them against its rampage and preserve their beauty for our posterity. Do you want to leave a language to your children bereft of vocabulary, starved of the proper methods of description? Do you want your language to be not unlike a totalitarian dictatorship—with no passion, no variety, no emotion—only the complete subservience to the tyrannical ‘hella?’ I call upon all those who wish for their language to be free forever to unite with me against this foul opponent. I know not how apathy may strike our peers in this time of trouble, but as for me, give me ‘hella’ liberty or make me deaf!